Sunday, August 16, 2009

One political subject which resurfaces every now and then is the question of Tibet. There is much sloganeering on this issue in the West “Poor Tibet! Those poor Tibetans, cowering under the yoke of Chinese tyranny! Free Tibet!” There are hundreds of ‘free Tibet’ organisations scattered throughout today’s distracted globe, ranting and raving about ‘human rights’ ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. These organisations tend to take root among the university educated European bourgeoisie, who enjoy hiking in the Himalayas, Buddhist meditation and the romance of ascetic monks locking themselves away from this cut-throat capitalist world. Given the barrage of Western propaganda in recent years from Hollywood movies to copious Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist publications, as well as the generous funding coming from the United States and Germany in particular, the Western hysteria regarding China’s nefarious governance of the region is not too surprising.

Almost any one you talk to in Europe will express sympathy with the Tibetan separatists and almost everyone loves the Dalai Lama. But what was Tibet like before those terrible Chinese communists invaded in 1951, a pristine land of prayer and tranquillity, high living standards and deep communal wisdom, a bastion of democracy? I’m afraid not.

Tibet was an absolutist theocracy. Over 90 percent of the population were serfs who were forced to labour for the Dalai Lama (not the present one)and his clerical aristocracy.

The conditions of the ordinary Tibetans were among the worst in the world when the Chinese communists ‘invaded’ in 1951. The Tibetan slaves had no rights and lived in abominable living conditions; torture, rape and execution were the norm for the Tibetan serf. Hands were cut off; people were skinned alive; eyes were gouged out, tongues torn out; hands and legs chopped off and disembowelment was common. Children were often kept as sex slaves by the lamas who enjoyed a Sybaritic lifestyle at the expense of the entire population.

This was the brutal autocracy of the cuddly and lovable Dalai Lamas, the hideous reality which the fanatical idiots of the ‘free Tibet’ campaign routinely ignore. When they talk about the sovereignty of the ‘Tibetan people’ what they unwittingly espouse is the sovereignty of the Tibetan oligarchy. Sure, the Dalai Lama claims he wants a democracy in Tibet and he talks about peace and love. But he also supports the genocidal US-led war in Iraq and Afghanistan just as he supported the US-NATO bombardment of Serbia. He actively intervened on behalf of the former Chilean dictator and mass murderer Augusto Pinochet when he was being protected by Margaret Thatcher, lobbying for him to be released without trial.

The Dalai Lama is the darling boy of the US Congress, receiving the prestigious Congressional medal for his untiring service to ‘human rights’ throughout the world. But the Dalai Lama’s real service to human rights has been to transpose the hideous cruelty of Lama rule in Tibet into a national liberation struggle against the People’s Republic of China. In fact, there may be signs that the extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign against China is coming to an end. The Los Angeles Times published an article on the 15th of September 1998 stating that the Dalai Lama has been on the CIA payroll for years with an annual salary amounting to a handsome 186,000 dollars. He has also received funding from the George Soros foundation and Indian intelligence. So much for the simple life of Buddhist anti-materialism! So that’s the Dalai Lama. But what about the human rights abuses of the Chinese government against the Tibetan people?

On March 18th 2008 rioters took to the streets of Llasa looting shops, burning schools and attacking innocent civilians throughout the city. Chinese state television showed horrific pictures of Tibetan rioters stoning people to death on the streets. Smashing peoples skulls was the Tibetan ‘freedom fighter’s preferred form of execution. The Tibetan hooligans set fire to over 200 residential houses and shops and more than 80 vehicles. Even Chinese fire fighters were the object of Tibetan aggression with fire engines set on fire. Meanwhile, our so called ‘free press’ was presenting the Tibetan aggression as a violent ‘crackdown’ by the big bad Chinese government on the ‘peaceful ‘ Tibetan protestors. The BBC and CNN manipulated images to portray the Chinese police as the aggressors. The German newspaper ‘Die Berliner Morganpost’ published pictures of police officers rescuing Han people as from Tibetan aggression as more evidence of a Chinese ‘crackdown’ on the peaceful protestors. German RTL television had to resort to more absurd lies to make their point by publishing picture of police aggression in Nepal! Hard to distinguish those Asians isn’t it!

The Free Tibet scam receives most of its funding from the Frederich Naumann Foundation in Germany and various CIA front organisations in the USA. The point of the Free Tibet campaign is to embarrass and destabilise the emerging Chinese superpower by manipulating groups who have issues with the Chinese government. It has received wide support from the EU and the USA who fear the imminent eclipse of their world hegemony by China. A Canadian-Tibetan by the name of Lladon Tethong is the director of the international Tibet student movement. The 2008 riots marked her first ever visit to her beloved country. When the Chinese People’s liberation army ‘ invaded’ Tibet in 1951, Tibetan serfs were liberated from centuries of brutal Lama tyranny. The Chinese communists built schools and hospitals, the liberated serfs were given land to farm and living standards improved. If anything the Chinese invasion was the liberation of Tibet from theocratic tyranny. To be sure , the Chinese government is no paragon of freedom and human rights. There have been many abuses and excesses but the Dalai Lamas were ten times worse!. The French socialist senator Jean-Luc Mélanchon is one of the few politicians to have debunked the Tibet freedom racket in public. Tibet is and always was part of China’s multicultural society. When will the West stop interfering in other countries about which it knows little and cares less?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the conflicting opinions circulating throughout more progressive media outlets regarding the Iranian election results. While the mainstream media was predictably unanimous in its accusations of fraud, independent sources were asking deeper questions: what if Athmadinejad actually won? I cited the work of various investigative journalists, intellectuals, who claimed that the furore over the election and the use yet again of a colour to describe it was nothing more than a CIA remote controlled coup attempt. There is no doubt that this has been the strategy of the US National Endowment for Democracy organization for a number of years.

All this sounds a little far-fetched, I know. But then again far-fetched is what the US military-industrial complex does best. The destabilization of Iran has been official US policy for at least over two years. It was even reported in the London Telegraph May 2007. According to the Telegraph Bush had ‘given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran.”Even ABC news couldn’t keep the secret. According to reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito ‘he CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community’.This is still official US policy in spite of the amiable facade of Obamism.

Speaking on Pakistan’s Pashto Radio last week, former Pakistani army general Mirza Aslam Beig claimed that the CIA distributed over 400 million dollars throughout Iran before the elections to stir up unrest.It has also been widely reported that the pseudo-leftist Mujahedeen Al Khalq, a terrorist organisation now exiled in Paris and the Jundallah Sunni terrorist organisation operating the southern Iranian province of Baluchistan are CIA assets.Indeed CIA sponsored covert terrorism in Iran has been the source of significant tension between Pakistan and Iran, with the Iranian government often accusing the Pakistanis of not controlling their Sunni extremists. Given their history of black operations installing fascist dictatorships throughout Latin America and other continents since the 1950s it would be unreasonable to exclude the hidden hand of the American or indeed British secret services in Iran’s turmoil.

So in a sense Athmadinejad and Khatemei are right to blame the Anglo-American establishment for much of the post-election trouble. But this time the Iranian government has turned decidedly Anglophobic. They have blamed the BBC for disseminating lies and anti-Iranian propaganda. Here again there is an element of truth in this. Take the BBC website headline on June 17th for example ‘Obama refuses to meddle in Iran’. Fine, but what about the picture underneath the heading? They published a picture of an Athmadinejad’s supporters in Tehran while claiming it was a demonstration by his opponents! The fraud was exposed on the website ‘What really happened.com and the BBC later apologised for the ‘error’. It is not the first time that pictures have been manipulated by the Western media for propaganda purposes. When the US and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, footage was released of a mob dancing around the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein.In reality there was only a few people present, but cleaver manipulation of the camera’s focal length created the impression that there were thousands of jubilant Iraqies present.

The confusion surrounding the Iranian elections is compounded when one considers the fact that socialist leaders like Hugo Chavez support Athmadinejad. To be sure, Venezuela’s president knows a thing or two about CIA dirty tricks; they created chaos in Venezuala for a brief period when Chavez was first elected, having their agents disguised as Chavistas fire on the crowd in order to blame the socialist leader. However, it is still hard to determine which side of the left/right political divide corresponds to Athamadinejad. Privatisation has been favoured by the Ayatollah Khatemei and is central to the five year economic development plan proposed in 2005. But many say that the ‘justice shares’offered to the lowest income families from newly privatised companies are the key to Athmadinejad’s popularity. Having said that, a high percentage of both neo-liberal and hard left Iranian organisations remain vehemently opposed to Athmadinejad. The Tudah communist party, the Iranian Communist Party(Marxist-Leninist-Maoist )and the Worker Communist Party of Iran all lambast the Iranian leader in their websites.These Marxist parties are all based outside the country as they were forcibly exiled after the Islamic revolution.What is clear from all of this is that the demonstrations in Iran transcend the election issue. The people have risen up against the clerical oligarchy, not in an effort to open Iran up to the world but to open it up to Iranians.

Yet the problem for Iran is that it finds itself governed by a clerical oligarchy split between support for stronger alignment with Russia and China(Athmadinejad and Khamenei) and negociation with the US ( Mousavi and Rafsanjani). It is easy to see how the latter could be manipulated by Washington. Both Rafsanjani and Moussavi were key players in the secret Iran/contra deals during the 1980s. Secret deals with America turned Rafsanjani into Iran's wealthiest man. So, the problem for Iran is that there is conflict on three fundamental levels. Class conflict among the people; conflict regarding the country's geopolitical direction among the ruling class; and conflict between the imperial powers for a say in Iran's natural resources.

Irish language media took a blow this month with the news that Foinse, the Irish language weekly newspaper, was to be taken out of circulation due to financial difficulties.Nevertheless Irish academia published a positive report last week concerning the advantages of bilingual education in Ireland. The research was carried out by Dr. Judith Wylie and Dr. Gerry Mulhern from Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Psychology. The school’s research concerns the cognitive development of children educated in Irish medium schools in Northern Ireland. The cognitive advantages shown in Irish medium schools were particularly striking in the areas of short-term memory and working memory. According to Dr Wylie “Short memory and working memory are centrally important in all learning, indeed everyday tasks such as reading, reasoning and mental arithmetic rely heavily on these processes. Using standardised tests of verbal and visual memory, our research comparedgroups of children from Irish-medium schools with children from the more usual English-only schools in Northern Ireland “ .

The Irish language revival movement has proved to be particularly strong throughout nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. But there was also been a significant increase shown among Ulster Protestants in the Irish language and heritage.The divide and rule policy of British imperialism in the North has often led to a warped view of Irish identity on both sides of the political divide. The Irish language is too often seen as an instrument of Irish nationalism, a way for Northern nationalists to dissociate themselves from the hegemony of British culture in the province. In many respects this is true. But there is a significant number of nationalists in the north who are deeply cognisant of the importance of Protestantism to Irish language heritage. After all, the Bible was first translated into Irish by a Protestant clergyman William Bedel in the 17th century . Queen Elizabeth herself showed a healthy curiosity in Irish. She even asked Christopher Nugent the Baron of County Westmeath to provide her with an Irish primer! The Presbyterian clergyman William Nielson was a champion of the language writing a grammar and phrase book to encourage learning of the language among his congregation. In fact, a significant number of the original Scottish planters in Ulster were Gaelic speakers. The language, then, is as most a feature of unionist Ulster as it is of nationalist Ireland.

There was, of course, a significant number of Protestant nationalists too who contributed to the revival of Irish, Douglas Hyde being the most obvious example. A survey done by Smith and Robinson in 1991 revealed that 23 percent of Northern Irish Protestants believe that Irish should be a compulsory subject in schools. This is surprisingly high given the level of cultural confusion that exists among Northern Ireland’s divided communities. There have, however, been pockets of Irish learners among Ulster’s protestants, most notably, a group of female Irish learners in the staunchly loyalist Shankill( Sean Cille- Old Church) Road. The Unionist politician Chris McGimpsey is a speaker of Irish and the Irish language daily Lá featured regular columns from the Unionist writer Ian Malcolm.According to Dr. Reamaí Mathers of Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta

“This groundbreaking work adds further evidence to the increasingly indisputable body of good science that shows that childrenwho are educated in Irish-medium schools are not only receiving the benefit of two languages but are also receiving tangible educational advantages. Earlier this year, Key Stage 2 assessments (Primary 7),which focus on the areas of English and maths, demonstrated that for the last three years attainment in Irish-medium education has been higher than the Northern Ireland average. What the Queen’s research provides is a deeper insight into the mechanisms at work in the superior performance by Irish-medium children when compared to the more usual Englishlanguage schools.”There is a compelling case for Irish medium education in this country North and South. When one considers the diverse and often paradoxical ideologies that promoted the language throughout our history, it does not seem impossible that Northern Ireland could yet become the leading province promoting Gaelic culture in these Islands.

Colour revolutions are the symptom of our inverted world.If we look at the global map over the past few years, we see a vast series of riots sparked by disputed election results.The countries involved in these struggles all come within the geo-political sphere of Eurasia; that is, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The mass movements of people who contested election results or revolted against their governments in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet, Burma, Mongolia and finally Moldova and Iran of this year were all characterised by botanic colours, rose, orange, pink, saffron, crimson,yellow, green and so on. There were also reverberations of these so-called revolutions in Belarus where rumours were spreading of a ‘denim revolution’ as well as violent protests in Azerbaijan and Armenia largely inspired by the colour revolutions in neighbouring states.

So, who is behind all of this? Who is funding, organising and co-ordinating all of these revolutions? Are they really the ‘bottom up’ phenomenon that the Western media would have us believe? Are the colour revolutions a genuinely informed expression of people’s desire for democracy or are there other forces at play? There can be no doubt about the legitimate aspirations of all these people for democracy and human rights. However, the reality is not so simple. The organisational and ideological infrastructure for these revolutions has been consistently provided by the multifarious ‘think-tanks’ and ‘foundations’ emanating from the United States and the EU. The most active of these political organisations has been the US National Endowment for Democracy, a pseudo-philanthropic organisation which works in tandem with the CIA(capitalism’s international agency) to exploit popular discontent in Eurasian countries in order to further US geostrategic interests in the region. Other key organisations include the Soros Foundation, International Republican Institute, USAID, Freedom House and The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

The reason for this funding is quite simple. The countries bordering the Caspian Sea sit on a potential fortune of untapped oil reserves. That is why the NED sent operatives into the former Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia just before the fall of the USSR to foment nationalist and ethnic consciousness in the name of ‘democracy’. Journalists, human rights groups, trade unions, fascist groups and extreme nationalists, and just about anyone who opposed the Soviet System were funded by the NED and Soros Foundation.

When the USSR fell in 1990, the independent tradition of Titoist Yugoslavia became a problem for the US and NATO. Ethnic conflict and economic collapse was to be the key to NATO’s imperialist intervention. In 1990 the US Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act which predicated the allocation of US financial assistance on the breakup of the Federal Yugoslav Republic into separate states. The scene was being set for ethnic conflict and genocide. Meanwhile, the IMF forced the Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic to make sweeping economic structural reforms in the country. By 1991as a result of IMF policies Yugoslavian GDP had plummeted by 15 percent, industrial production by 21 percent and inflation had risen by 140 percent. The IMF then prevented the Yugoslav government from obtaining credit from its own central bank. In order to speed up the process of destruction, the US imposed an economic embargo on the country in 1992. The result was economic collapse. Unemployment would reach 70 percent with Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs roaming the streets in fascist militias all committing atrocities. By 1999, however, the recalcitrant Serbs would be blamed for the entire mess. The Western Media remained obdurately silent on Bosnian Muslim and Croatian Catholic atrocities. The Bosnian KLA terrorists had been helped by none other than Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, the CIA’s foreign legion(at the time of course!). The US-Nato intervention in Kossovo had nothing to do with human rights or democracy.It was about the control of the Caspian Sea resources and the projection of Anglo-American/NATO hegemony over a vast region of vital economic and geostrategic interest.

The colour revolutions are nothing but a sham, a sinister and cynical manipulation programme funded by American oligarchies. Zbigniew Brzezinski (the man who created Al Qaeda) and President Obama’s National Security Advisor put it bluntly in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives where he writes ‘For America the chief prize is Eurasia’ The main inspiration for Brzezinski’s imperialist thinking comes from the 19th century British geopolitical strategist Harold Mackinder, who also inspired Adolf Hitler. Mackinder famously said ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;"who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;"who rules the World-Island commands the world.’ The colour revolutions have been among the most spectacular mass deception operations in history. They are designed to install corrupt US puppets such as Yushchenko in Ukraine and Saakashvili in Georgia.But they have failed in Moldova, Iran and Ouzbekistan. Another ruse may yet be necessary in order to ‘liberate’ the oppressed people of Eurasia.

As usual the eyes of the world were obsequiously fixed on the fat cats meeting in Aquila Italy recently for the G8 summit.We are, of course, led to believe that these men actually discuss the problems of the world with intentions of solving them. If we had a free media we would already know the agenda for the G8 summit, as it is usually in concert with the deliberations of the world’s financial elite who meet in secret to formulate policies propitious to their interests; clandestine groups such as the Bilderberg Group or the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, America’s Council on Foreign Relations or its sister club in Britain The Royal Institute of International Affairs, all fronts for the insatiable megalomania and lucre-lust of the global ‘banksters’

You will probably have read nothing about a meeting of far more importance for the future of the world, a meeting that represents the aspirations of over half the world’s population and over two-thirds of earth’s nations; I’m talking about the Non-Aligned Movement. They met in Havana Cuba from 11th to the 15th of July. It was in the Cuban capital that the group made the widely un-mediatised Havana Declaration in 1979, the year when Thatcher came to power in Britain, declaring war on the British working class and the peasants of the developing world with her draconian ‘Third World’ debt collection policies.

The Havana Declaration advocates the "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."[

The foundation work for the movement was laid in the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in April 24 1955 to oppose the neo-colonialism of the United States and the grouping of countries into blocs represented by the USA and the USSR.The first official non-aligned summit was held in Belgrade in 1961. The founding fathers of the NAM were Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Only three of the five progressive leaders would survive however, Kwame Nkrumha, one of Africa’s most popular leaders and the left-leaning president Sukarno of Indonesia were later ousted in CIA sponsored military coups. There greatest crimes were that they favoured the interests of their own impoverished people over those of the US plutocracy.

The NAM is deeply critical of US global hegemony, Zionism, unfair trade practices as well as the tyrannical donor conditionalities of the IMF and the dictatorial decision-making procedures of the UN Security Council. In short, they are calling for an end to neo-imperialism. In 1976 in Colombo Sri Lanka, the leaders of 85 non-aligned states met to discuss proposals for solving the economic crisis in developing countries due to the 1973 oil-price shock. The 1973 oil price shock was the result of the Yom Kipper war between Israel , Egypt and Syria. The US Secretary of State at the time Dr. Henry Kissinger was largely responsible for the escalation of events which led to this war, carefully manipulating both sides. A radical hike in the price of oil had been agreed upon in the Saltsjobaden Bilderberg Conference of 1973 in Sweden in order to increase demand for US dollars and boost returns from Anglo-American North Sea oil investments. War in the Middle East was the result. OPEC imposed an oil embargo in protest at Israeli aggression just as the Anglo-American establishment had hoped, although Britain through Kissinger’s diplomacy escaped the embargo. OPEC conveniently got the blame for their reaction to the fabricated war. Meanwhile third world economies had to double borrowing from Western Banks to pay for the oil imports.

The Colombo meeting of NAM attempted to deal with the devastating consequences Third World indebtedness to western banks due to the oil hike scam by forming closer ties with OPEC. Kissinger was having none of it. Within months of the Colombo initiative the principal leaders involved, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, Prime Minister Siramavo Bandaranaike (the world’s first female Prime Minister)of Sri Lanka were ousted from power, while Guyana’s minister for foreign affairs Frederick Wills was forced to resign. Foreign interference was largely responsible for the toppling of the Colombo initiative and by the 1980s children were being recruited into sweet shops run by multinationals to pay for the mammoth debt imposed on the Third World by the countries of today’s G8. This barbarous chicanery is called neo liberalism, and it is the real agenda of the G8.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold’ Robert Mugabe.

Critics on both sides of the left-right paradigm generally agree on the appalling legacy of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe.Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media beams apocalyptic images of hunger, devastation and disease as the Zimbabwean economy continues to collapse. But the origins as well as the internal and external forces which have contributed to this catastrophe are rarely discussed in detail. Instead, Mugabe is represented as the epitome of the post-colonial, corrupt, African leader oppressing his own people in an insane attempt to preserve his brutal autocracy. Currently ranked as number 7 on Parade magazine’s World’s Worst Dictators list, Mugabe is universally accused of using anti-imperialist and anti-racist propaganda to divert attention from his own oppressive policies, blaming the West for African problems. However, few people in Europe understand the underlying features of these problems

When the Marxist ZANU party finally succeeded in ousting British imperialist rule from Zimbabwe in 1980 Mugabe became the symbol of the new progressive African leader and was copiously rewarded with honorary degrees by many Western universities.

One would be inclined to consider such Western largess unusual for a Marxist leader in the middle of the Cold War, but that is because Mugabe was forced to compromise his revolutionary principles in the interests of ‘realpolitik’. Indeed, it is highly questionable if he ever really had them to begin with. Nevertheless, the best one could hope for when dealing with a rapacious British imperial state was a meagre share for Zimbabweans of their own national resources or nothing.When the Lancaster Agreement was signed in 1979, Mugabe agreed to allow a 20 seat representation for the white minority and a twenty year moratorium on constitutional amendments. This was bad news for the landless peasants, hungry for land redistribution, who made up the majority of the population. Yet, in spite of these drawbacks, Mugabe’s progressive policies in the areas of health and education produced remarkable results. From 1980 to 1990 infant mortality rates had been significantly reduced, malnutrition rates had halved and Zimbabwe had one of the highest literacy rates in the developing world.

One of the problems in understanding the internal politics of Zimbabwe revolves around the conflicting interests of the rural landless peasants (what we in Ireland used to call ‘spalpíní) and the urban working and middle classes. Torn between the competing interests of these classes; his own desire to stay in power, and the voracious drive of multi-national companies to exploit the resources of his country for their own gain, Mugabe tended to rotate in a vortex of competing forces. If he ignored the interests of the imperials powers, they would put measures in place to ruin his economy or assassinate him as in the case of the noble Patrice Lumumba of Congo or his old friend, the great Nkruma of Ghana. Those leaders had made the mistake of putting their own country’s interests first and were consequently ousted by the CIA. On the other hand, he also had to appease the desires of Zimbabweans.

When the World Bank forced ‘structural reforms’ on the Zimbabwean economy in 1991,unemployment soared, Mugabe lost the traditional support he had enjoyed among the state sector workers and the middle classes. Another complicating factor here was the class tension between the two principal ethnic groups in the country, namely the Shoma majority and the Ndebele minority. The British always tended to favour the minority in order to divide and rule. As a result, the Ndebele tended to produce leaders of the urban trade unions rather than the peasant liberation movement. Mugabe, himself of Shona extraction, had supported the traditional class structure until the rural unrest in the late nineties, evicting peasant squaters from settler-owned land.

According to the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, by 1991 the opposition to Mugabe was now quite diverse ‘ containing, on the one hand, public sector workers trying to roll back the tide of Structural Adjustment; on the other, uncompromising free-marketeers such as Eddie Cross, the MDC secretary of economic affairs and a senior figure in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who was intent on privatising almost everything, including education.’ Meanwhile, Mugabe was facing fierce pressure from his landless veterans who wanted radical land distribution. By this stage, however, external funding for the urban trade union opposition from the US Ford Foundation, Heritage Foundation and others steered that movement in the direction of neo-liberalism; these organisations lobbied extensively in favour of a no vote on land redistribution.

Having lost the 2000 referendum on land redistribution the peasants rebelled and invaded the white-run farms. With the land revolution came imperialist sanctions and a freeze on credit resulting in economic collapse. But there were other reasons motivating the West’s desire to oust Mugabe. He had defended the Democratic Republic of Congo against the Anglo-American funded proxy armies of Uganda and Rwanda in African Great War. The imperial powers had used the Ugandan and Rwandan armies to plunder Congolese minerals. This is one of the many Anglo-American ‘little secrets’ of recent African history. Another reason they wanted Mugabe out is because he refused IMF ‘conditionalities’. The Heritage Foundation, one of the chief funders of the opposition movement to Mugabe cite his insistence on subsidies for agriculture and state-owned industries, customs and tariffs on imports and land redistribution as the chief cause of concern. There is therefore an inconvenient truth in Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. That is why Mugabe is ‘Hitler’ and the dozens of other dictators the imperial powers support are not.